zmodo

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n3wb
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Jake

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Code did you get one of these? I saw the same thing and have been trying to find a real review.

Does anyone have any hands on experience with this Zmodo?
I am looking for a basic & easy setup kit like this. I'm not crazy about the mounts but for the price...

Thanks
 

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Hi Jake

Yes, I did buy this and just got done testing it.

Setup was very simple, just plug in every thing and it starts working automagically!

IR range at night time is around 50 feet but it can be tricky to get a clear picture, I found that the picture gets washed out effect sometimes, maybe this was when i was moving camera between an alley that had night light and the other one which was dark. When i pointed camera to dark alley, i got washed out pic and then after power cycling camera and not moving it, the picture became perfect.

NVR doesn't stream in 720p and I couldn't download the recorded file from NVR so cant check if it records in 720p, the picture on monitor doesn't seem to be 720p though but maybe because it was night time right now.

As with most of the NVR/DVR/ipcam software that I have seen so far, this one is also full of bugs. The web-client is an activex (ocx) control which would only work on IE and would crash every now and then throwing a message box saying "exception dump generated". They do have a zsight android and iphone app that I havent tested yet.
The web/admin panel wouldn't let me download recordings and would throw an access denied error always.

When the cameras are operated at night, they go into black and white mode, going into the camera admin panel and manually setting it to color would then start showing colors for part of the picture that is naturally lit. You have to do this every time camera switches its IR on, i think this is a bug in camera software.

Overall, I think its an OK system to start with but I pretty soon felt left out wanting for more (in terms of quality) out of the system, I guess for $320 it's not a bad deal and good for starters but definitely not for advanced users.

Hope this helps.
 

bp2008

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Hmm. My only experience with zmodo is a much older analog cam system purchased by a local volunteer search and rescue organization. It was easily the lowest quality I've ever seen in a camera system. IR was absolutely terrible - effective range about 3 feet. The DVR wouldn't even do resolution beyond about 320x240. Similarly, it required an activex control. What I ended up doing with it was connecting to the video streams with Blue Iris so the DVR only had to function as a video encoder. This runs stable and made the system usable.

You might consider trying the same if the NVR is unacceptable. You could install a trial version of Blue Iris on a PC and see if you can get it to work with your NVR. I don't know if BI supports newer Zmodo NVRs or not... but if so then you'll be much better off using Blue Iris for the remote view than the IE control I suspect. You'll want the CPU on the PC to score at least 2000 on cpubenchmark.net for good performance.

From the look of it, your cameras that came with the NVR are ordinary PoE network cameras, which means you don't necessarily need the NVR to put them to use. A PoE switch like this one http://amzn.com/B003CFATT2 would let you connect them directly to your LAN and you could probably configure the cameras directly and get Blue Iris to decode their video streams.
 
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hmjgriffon

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You probably won't see many reviews because systems like that suck. The cameras suck, the DVR's suck, the software sucks. You get what you pay for, a crappy picture, an underpowered DVR with buggy software and low feature set. But hey if all you wanna be able to do is know if there is a blob in the area, you should be good to go. :)
 

bp2008

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I'm sure the cameras aren't that bad! LOL. Even the dirt cheap analog cams in that zmodo system I dealt with were better than that!
 
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